France will help reconstruction and reconciliation efforts in Iraq as it emerges from a war against Islamic State, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Saturday after talks with Iraqi officials in Baghdad.<\/p>\n
France is a main partner in the US-led coalition helping Baghdad fight the militants who seized parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The coalition provided key air and ground support to Iraqi forces in the nine-month campaign to take back Mosul, Islamic State\u2019s capital in Iraq.<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s fall in July effectively marked the end of the \u201ccaliphate\u201d declared by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi over parts of Iraq and Syria. Iraqi forces were close to taking back full control of IS\u2019s northwestern stronghold of Tal Afar on Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are present in the war and we will be present in the peace,\u201d Le Drian told a news conference in Baghdad with French Defence Minister Florence Parly and Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if our joint combat against Daesh is not finished, it is entering a phase of stabilisation, of reconciliation, of reconstruction, a phase of peace,\u201d Le Drian said, calling Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.<\/p>\n
During the talks, Iraqi Prime Minister Hayder al-Abadi urged France to invest in Iraq, \u201cat the economic, commercial and investment levels\u201d, according to a statement from his office.<\/p>\n
France will grant a \u20ac430 million ($513 million) loan to Iraq before the end of the year, a French diplomatic source said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
France will help reconstruction and reconciliation efforts in Iraq as it emerges from a war against Islamic State, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Saturday after talks with Iraqi officials in Baghdad. France is a main partner in the US-led coalition helping Baghdad fight the militants who seized parts of Iraq and Syria […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3071,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[315],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3070"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3072,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3070\/revisions\/3072"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}